The Journey to Mage Titans USA

Firstly, let me thank you for your continued support.

Mage Titans is a community event and I wanted to personally thank everyone for all of your support and sharing over the last two years. Without you, Mage Titans wouldn’t be, but with you it has been quite a journey!

We first launched Mage Titans because we could see the fantastic work which was happening in the community, but we felt that there was a need for a platform to enable us all to better communicate our learnings, to challenge ourselves, and to drive ourselves forwards. Clearly Mage Talk, Stack Overflow, and other forums offer good sources of information and a great opportunity to interact, but we wanted to create a real community where thoughts, ideas and knowledge could be shared.

Sharing is very close to my heart, and something that I feel is critically important to enable us to grow and evolve. We have ensured that sharing is at the heart of my company Space 48, in fact it is in our DNA, and our culture revolves around this. With Mage Titans, we have been able to open up to more ideas and knowledge yet – and together we are really creating something special. I was recently asked to talk at a TEDx and (as you can see from the video), this was really inspired by the success of Mage Titans:

It’s been a really interesting journey over the last 2 years, with just over 160 people attending the Manchester event in year one. In year two we saw the number grow to over 250 with representatives from around the globe contributing as both speakers and attendees. We have even been asked to run two extra events this year; the first with Alessandro Ronchi, who asked us to collaborate with him to create Mage Titans Milan in February. Ben Marks also suggested that we look to run another event which evolved into Mage Titans Mini just last week. Never being one to rest on my laurels, this led me to explore the question of what (or should I say where) next?

Our friends at Mage Talk had already suggested doing something in the USA, but last week whilst at Mage Titans Mini, conversation blew up on Twitter following a Tweet from Karen Baker of Web Shop Apps and Shipper HQ. Timing is essential with most things in life and a successful Mage Titans event is no different, so following the Twitter frenzy Karen and I decided to move forwards with this.

While this is still in very early stages, we are looking to run the event in Austin in September (8th and 9th) and we hope that you will all agree that this is a good idea. We will be doing a call for papers so if you have something which you wish to contribute, please keep an eye out for the announcements. Equally, if there is a particular topic you want to know more about, please shout up and we will see if we can help ensure this is covered. Adding your feedback for the recent Mage Titans Mini will also help us to learn and build a great #MageTitansUSA event and a better than ever #MageTitans (Manchester) – you can leave your #MTMini16 comments here.

I have been truly humbled by the support for Mage Titans in Europe and the events which have already run that have raised a great deal of money for charity in addition to delivering even more in the form of knowledge share. I do hope that you will join me in making this the biggest and best Mage Titans yet!